Trying
by KNS
Summary: A mistake is evidence that someone has tried to do something. Spoilers for KLG 1&2.


Trying

by KNS

Not mine, not mine, I like them a lot, but they're not mine.

Notes: Season 1, Episode13. Beware of spoilers.

During those days men will seek death, but will not find it;  
they will long to die, but death will elude them.  
Revelations 9:6 (NIV)

And she'd like to think that in a moment she'll snap awake, heart pounding and eyes wide – and she'll laugh a little, because the dream was so realistic. Cylone, nukes, raiders and outdated vipers – it's the details that make the difference, like the way the old viper engines' vibrations set her teeth on edge until clear of the launch tubes.

Everyone has the same dream; only the details are different. Unfortunately, no one ever gets to wake up.

She remembers how blue the Caprica sky was the morning after it rained.

The Old Man's footfalls are heavy on the deck as he walks away. He didn't lie to her this time, and that's something. Not much, but something. One more minute and she'd've asked him outright: Do you know where Earth is? He left before she could ask – a tactical retreat.

Bitterness is heavy on her tongue.

She's lied to him before. Well, not lied, exactly, just kept quiet. He lied. He lied to the last of an entire race. She believed him. She wishes she could still believe him.

She's standing in a dark corner overlooking the midhanger bay. Below her, the captured raider is being outfitted for a new mission. No Chief or Cally down there now; they're lost on some mythical planet.

Time for her own mythical journey.

* * *

And even though Sharon never comes off as a hulking giant, she looks particularly small and fragile on the med bed. The bandage on her face dwarfs her jaw, makes her eyes seem large and innocent.

"How you doin', Boomer?" Starbuck asks. She keeps her tone light and easy, like she's caught the lieutenant and the chief together in the tool room again.

She remembers the one time a couple of them took shore leave together, one long, hazy night of drinking and laughing.

Boomer tries to smile; it looks more like a grimace. "Hangin' in there," she answers, slurring some of the words. "Heard you're headin' out."

Starbuck sits down on the edge of the bunk. "Yeah. Gotta go save your lover boy out there. Need him to keep fixin' those vipers I keep breakin'."

Boomer's eyes slide away. "That's done."

She knows what the raptor pilot means, but pretends she doesn't. "Nope, no one else can fix an engine like him. Don't worry, I'll try to get him back in one piece for you." She stands up, gets ready to go.

Sharon catches her hand, quickly lets it go. "Hey – hey, Starbuck? Do you – do you ever think maybe, maybe something got fracked up? Maybe we were supposed to get blasted like the rest of humanity, and some other people were supposed to live?" She looks at the bulkhead. "I keep having this dream, that I'll wake up and everything will be normal again. You know?"

Starbuck knows.

* * *

And now it's time to suit up and get going. She stops beside the raider, leans on a wing and looks across the deck. Lee is giving his viper a once-over, ever the cautious pilot.

Sometimes she looks at him and sees Zack. Most of the time she just sees him.

I'm really sorry, she'd told him, and meant it in a hundred ways.

Something makes him glance in her direction. His face closes, his lips pressed in a hard line, and he turns away.

That's when she makes the decision. Because Sharon's theory may be right, but she's alive and Lee's alive and so are a few thousand other people, and they can't go on like this forever. They have to have some place to go.

If the Old Man can't get them there, maybe the dying president can. Maybe not.

She remembers the last time she walked through a garden, a real garden on solid ground, the smell of vegetation and wet earth.

* * *

And when Caprica slides onto the viewscreen, she recognizes it instantly, the familiar shapes of continents and oceans. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and she laughs and hums a few bars of an old song because it's wonderful to be home.

The wonder fades as she brings the raider down through the atmosphere. The blue sky is gone – orange now, like everything else, the rust-orange of a nuclear holocaust. In Caprica City, the remaining buildings glare at the world with glass-less windows, the eyeless sockets of corpses strung up for public display. On the ground, opening the raider's hatch, the first thing she notices is that everything is dead, from the toasted air to the frizzled grass. Nothing moves, there is no sound but the distant hum of engines in the far, far distance.

She remembers standing near this same place not so long ago, and watching birds fly overhead, their reflections cast down into a still pool of water.

Home is gone, a shattered mirror with pieces flung so far they could never all be recovered. This is hell, and she is alone.

She pulls a weapon and runs, runs to find what she came for, and only stops for an anti-radiation injection. If only she could innoculate her eyes against the radiation's destruction, her ears against its silence.

Once this place was a museum; now it's just another gutted wreck, everything destroyed. Or, almost everything. In its glass case, the statue hand holds the Arrow just as the President claimed. It's the last of the artifacts left untouched by the destruction.

She lifts her weapon and fires, one shot, and now the case is destroyed, too, and she is just like the cylons.

* * *

And now she knows what it's like to have her own ass served to her on a plate. She's been in fights before, but she's never had the sense that her opponent intended to beat her to death. It's not how she wants to die.

The cylon is a woman, a beautiful woman who fights without flinching, no hint of mercy in her human-like eyes. She even sounds human.

Starbuck remembers herself at fourteen, blond hair about that length. Maybe she was never that pretty, but she was definitely never this cruel.

So who cares? It looks like she's going to die alone in hell, beaten into a pulp by a beautiful cylon. Since she's going to die anyway, might as well take the cylon with her.

She left things okay with Lee; he knows she's sorry. The Old Man – well, she could've done better. They're most important. A few others matter, but she did what she could for them. She's about to die for them.

The cylon goes with her over the edge, but only one of them gets up again.

Everything hurts, really hurts, outside and in. But – Helo's here?

She doesn't ask questions, doesn't give a damn, she hurts but she's not alone. "Oh, I missed you."

Then she glances over his shoulder, and Sharon's there. But it can't be Sharon, Sharon's on Galactica recovering from –

In an instant she understands. Now the pain on the outside is nothing, nothing compared to what's on the inside. Sharon is a cylon. Her friend, her fellow pilot, someone she's always trusted.

She grabs Helo's weapon, tries to fire –

"You can't! She's pregnant," Helo says urgently.

Helo is protecting a cylon, a pregnant cylon, a cylon who looks like Sharon who was his co-pilot who is her friend who is a cylon.

No more friendship, no more trust.

The cylons now have everything.

And Starbuck can do nothing but wail in horror and agony and slide down the crumbling wall, because the cylons have everything now.

(End)


End file.
